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02/08/2017

Convert Ghostscript to PDF

To convert a Ghostscript file to PDF it's quite useful to have the utility ps2pdf installed on your system; it will come as part of the Ghostscript installation.

Then, make sure you have the gs command on the path and run either of these scripts depending on the PDF version you want to generate (note that the official documentation will be constantly updated, this page not!) :

  • ps2pdf12 produces PDF 1.2 output (Acrobat 3-and-later compatible).
  • ps2pdf13 produces PDF 1.3 output (Acrobat 4-and-later compatible).
  • ps2pdf14 produces PDF 1.4 output (Acrobat 5-and-later compatible).
  • ps2pdf per se currently produces PDF 1.4 output. However, this may change in the future. If you care about compatibility with a specific output level,use the -dCompatibilityLevel=1.x switch in the command line, or one of the specific version aliases ps2pdf12, ps2pdf13, or ps2pdf14.
Another thing to be aware of is that you might receive some errors while generating the PDF such as /invalidfileaccess in /findfont 

This might mean that you are missing a specific font installed on your system, but if that is not the case, maybe the font or some other file is not accessible due to permissions restrictions. You can try by running the utility again and adding -dnosafer as option.